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Hot-in-place Recycling Key to Denver's Street Maintenance
Many Denver streets gain new life at a considerable savings through a major preservation program that recycles and paves in one pass
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Denver's City and County Department of Public Works' Street Maintenance Division maximizes it budget by allocating over 30 percent of the funds it receives to road preservation — hot in-place recycling and chip seal.
This is the fifth full year the agency has contracted with Lawrence, KS-based Cutler Repaving to rejuvenate many of the city's residential streets using a hot in-place recycling process that turns old pavements into a new base and then tops the structure with a fresh hot mix asphalt layer in one pass.
The 2006 budget earmarks $2.6 million to recycle 390,000 yards of worn pavements. During the first five years of the program, the preservation approach was used to recycle 1.1 million square yards of asphalt, saving the agency over $5 million compared to a conventional mill and overlay approach.
"It's been such a cost-effective way for us to address a lot of the streets we have in our network," says Dan Roberts, P.E., director of the street maintenance division. "Most of the streets we target for hot in-place are aging residential streets that don't have a lot of heavy traffic volume. By recycling the aged pavement surface and then overlaying it with new HMA, we're able to extend the life of that road at a very reasonable cost. And the process allows us to refurbish a street within a day or two from start to finish."
The one-pass hot in-place process heats, scarifies, rejuvenates the existing aged pavement — turning it into a new one-inch leveling course, and then places a new one-inch layer of virgin hot mix directly over the yet-heated recycled course. Since Denver supplies the hot mix used in the process, additional recycling benefits are achieved. Denver incorporates 20 percent reclaimed asphalt pavement (RAP) in the mix it produces. The process works extremely well, according to Roberts, because it not only completes both recycling and new HMA placement in one pass, but it also achieves a stronger thermal bond between the heated recycled leveling course and the new driving surface.
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